Archives for September 14, 2004

The reason why I posted so much yesterday is that there really wasn’t much else I could do. A three-man film crew moved into my apartment after lunch to tape me talking about Paul Taylor. Their arrival time fluctuated throughout the morning (first they wanted to come at two, then they wanted to come at four, then they wanted to come at two…), and though they were perfectly nice in every possible way, the vacillations disrupted my writing rhythms. Once they finally arrived, it took them an hour to set up and another hour to knock down. Unable to summon up enough consecutive thought to write a piece, I gave up and started knocking out blog entries instead.

Today will be different. It’d better be. I have two Wall Street Journal pieces due, a profile for Wednesday’s paper and a drama column for Friday’s paper. Assuming I get them done on time, I can start working on the 2,000-word book review that I’m scheduled to ship off to a magazine some time tomorrow. (To my credit, I’ve already written 500 words’ worth of the review, but the rest has yet to make itself manifest.)

For all these reasons, I’m leaving the show to Our Girl today, and maybe tomorrow, too, depending entirely on how smoothly the prose flows. For the moment, I put out enough food on Monday to keep you happy, right?

“The loss of excitement is the beginning of professionalism. The thrill of standing on a stage, of receiving the audience’s attention and admiration, the release of becoming someone other than yourself: all these stimuli are transient and superficial. They must be replaced by something much more deeply rooted which takes as its starting point the audience’s experience rather than your own.”

Regular readers will recall that I wrote earlier this year about Rick McKay’s film Broadway: The Golden Age, both here and in The Wall Street Journal:

Mr. McKay is one of those starry-eyed small-town types who moved to New York in the ’80s, found that the parade had already gone by, and longed to know what he’d missed. Instead of retreating to his apartment to play his original-cast albums, he bought a digital-video camera and finagled more than a hundred Broadway stars of the pre-“Hair” era into letting him interview them. He shaped the resulting footage into “Broadway: The Golden Age,” in which talking-head interviews with the illustrious likes of Carol Channing, Ben Gazzara, Robert Goulet, Angela Lansbury, Jerry Orbach, Shirley MacLaine, John Raitt, Gwen Verdon, and Elaine Stritch are ingeniously commingled with heart-stoppingly rare performance footage lifted from home movies, newsreels, theatrical trailers and videotapes. The result is an irresistibly nostalgic portrait of a lost era, albeit one that zips along like the Twentieth Century Limited. The editing alone deserves an Oscar.

Not to worry, for Mr. McKay knows when to ease back on the throttle and simply let his subjects talk. And talk they do, often amusingly and always movingly, about what it was like to work alongside such near-forgotten giants as Laurette Taylor (who is seen in her Hollywood screen test, the only sound film she ever made) and Kim Stanley (where on earth did Mr. McKay dredge up what looks like a kinescope of a live performance of “Bus Stop”?). You’ll weep–I did–to hear them share their fond memories of crummy apartments, Automat meals and big breaks.

Produced and marketed on half a shoestring, this one-man labor of love is slowly making its way across America, one screen at a time….

Well, you know what? It still is. I recently received an electronic press release from McKay announcing still more openings for Broadway: The Golden Age, which is already showing all over the place. To find out whether it’s headed for a multiplex near you, go here. A DVD is in the works, but trust me–this film deserves to be viewed in a theater, in the company of hundreds of other stage-struck men and women who either remember the good old days or wish they’d been alive to see them. I myself look forward to its return to New York on Sept. 28. See you there.

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, ran earlier this season at New Orleans’ Le Petit Theatre. It previously closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, … [Read More...]

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]